Heat removal is a prominent factor in computer system and data center design. The number of servers deployed within a data center has steadily increased as server performance has improved, thereby increasing the amount of heat generated during the regular operation of the servers. The reliability of servers used within a data center decreases if the environment in which they operate is permitted to increase in temperature over time. A significant portion of the data center's power is used for cooling electronics at the server level. As the number of servers within a data center increase, a greater portion of the power is commensurately consumed by the data center to cool electronic components within the servers.
Indirect evaporative cooling/cooler (IDEC) is a popular cooling solution for data centers. IDEC uses exterior air to cool interior air of the data center through air-to-air heat exchangers. In addition, IDEC uses evaporative cooling (i.e., the temperature of a parcel of air is cooled by evaporation of water into it) when ambient air dry-bulb temperature (the temperature of freely exposed air) is not sufficiently low. Furthermore, IDEC can use direct expansion cooling during extreme ambient temperature conditions. In addition, the architecture of IDEC solution can be simple, but more reliable.
However, when IDECs are used for data center buildings with multiple floors, several challenges, such as leakage, weight requirements, and complex air duct designs, arise for both a perimeter installation and a roof installation, especially in the cases which multiple floors are designed for IT data center rooms and each of the floors requires cooling from several IDEC units.